For All Mankind Recap: Freedom Isn’t Free

For All Mankind
Svoboda
Season 5 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Watching Irina Morozova use her own tooth to have a few illuminating chats with her fellow inmates via Morse code, I was powerfully reminded of the gulf between her, a woman made of adamantium, and me, a soft little house cat in human form. And when she then set that tooth on the table between herself and the interrogator who had helpfully removed it from her jaw with a well-placed punch sometime earlier, calmly showing him that what he had thought was a lesson was actually giving her the tool of his own undoing? An incredible “You must not know about me” moment from someone who probably did not spend her prison time committing Beyoncé lyrics to memory. Couldn’t be me, but my God, it’s delicious. 

Let’s not confuse slightly horrified admiration for Irina’s determination with admiration for her as a person. She continues to be the same sneaky, conniving, faithless operator she has always been. If this woman is drawing breath, she is looking for an advantage and a way to exploit it. Lenya’s struggles to maintain order and routine shipments of iridium flowing smoothly from Happy Valley to Earth provide a perfect opportunity for her to start racking up a bunch of wins on her visit to Mars as part of the Kuragin delegation. Needling everyone is plainly one of Irina’s favorite activities, and the buffet of victims she finds at Happy Valley — Lenya, Tasha, Aleida, and Dev right off the bat — make the visit worthwhile immediately. 

Irina enjoys several advantages over her comrades, chief among them her past as a high-ranking KGB officer. Sure, she works for Kuragin now, rather than the state espionage apparatus that eventually turned on her, but the patina of her decades running Star City hasn’t worn off a bit. And as Tasha points out, once KGB, always KGB. This woman looks quiet and demure as she strolls around Happy Valley in her skirt suits and smooth hair (no more prison crew cut for her, thanks!), but she’s a terrifying shark who delights in intimidating others with minimal effort. 

The Kuragin-Helios-Mars governor meeting is a perfect example of an Irina special, seething with discord about everything other than annoyance with the Marsies — the people who risk their lives daily to mine iridium on Goldilocks for the sake of various economies back on Earth — who are making demands for accountability and more of a say in Mars governance. After some increasingly waspish bickering between Aleida and Irina, the group manages to agree once more on the importance of the Space Elevator and Titan mission succeeding unaffected by the ongoing protests. 

Across several scenes, it becomes clear that the protesters are not to be distracted by the Space Elevator or the Titan mission. This is an increasingly bad headache for Lenya, but I wouldn’t want to be in Palmer’s, Fred’s, or Boyd’s shoes, either. Any respect civilians might have had for the MPKs has crumbled to dust following Lee’s escape, Ed’s death, and the automation-plan leak. At one point, a Marsie hurls a venomous “Go back to Earth, pecker!” as he passes Fred. Fred and Palmer can’t get their heads around what the rest of the Marsies are so worked up about, and Boyd has far bigger fish to fry because her freelance sleuthing in the space-suit checkout logs has revealed something terrible. After a bunch of hedging and anguished facial expressions from Fred, he fesses up: Yes, he was working the same Kuragin nightshift as Yoon. To Boyd’s increasing horror, Fred tells her Yoon had pieced together the idea that automation is coming and was very fired up about it. Fred and another MPK who was there that night were told to take Yoon out in a Rover and scare him a little bit, but everything spiraled out of control and Yoon died.

At least Fred looks truly torn up about his role in this tragedy. But being filled with regret for causing the death of another person, while taking exactly zero action to mitigate the damage done, and admitting he knocked his work bestie unconscious and participated in Lee’s wrongful arrest with seemingly zero qualms just aren’t going to cut it. Fred tries to excuse himself by saying that by following Boyd to Level 5 and assaulting her, he was trying to protect her. Why does she still insist on lofty goals such as serving actual justice and protecting their fellow Happy Valley residents, when the system is stacked against them? Why can’t she go along to get along? Ugh, what a drag! Poor, poor Fred!!

Actually, poor everyone on the Red Planet because Fred’s final reveal before the MPKs are dispatched to the shopping district to break up the demonstration is even worse than I anticipated. There’s no point in Boyd reporting any of this to Palmer, who already knows all about it: “Who do you think told me to deal with Yoon in the first place?” Ugh, forget it, Boyd. It’s Happy Valley. Mireille Enos and Tyler Labine are so good in this scene — there’s genuine warmth and care between Boyd and Fred, but they can only talk past each other and are stuck in the same systemic trap. Their conversation is cut short by all the MPKs moving out to enforce the base-wide curfew that Lenya, with wary support from Irina, of course, has just announced. He wants the MPKs to clear the street and arrest everyone who refuses to leave, but he doesn’t give any specific orders about the degree of force they can use. Palmer says he wants protocol followed to a tee, but once the defiant “Mars! Is! Ours!” chants start, it’s obvious the MPKs are out of their depth. The so-called Peacekeepers are the ones who incite a riot.

The Marsies who resist arrest are doing so without batons, skull-protecting helmets, and guns containing, technically, nonlethal rounds. The MPKs have no idea how to de-escalate the situation and fall back on what seems to be their default setting of being disproportionately violent toward unarmed fellow humans. I can’t even admonish Miles Dale for absolutely whaling on the MPK trying to zip-tie an unconscious Lily. He shouldn’t have done it, but I can identify two mitigating factors off the top of my head. First, Palmer is continuing to hound Miles for information he doesn’t have on who leaked the documents about the automation plan. Second, he has just witnessed his child being beaten unconscious by an armed guy whose job is to serve corporate interests. The entire event is just a large-scale version of what Fred did to Yoon: A situation got out of control, and a person in a position of authority was out of their depth and resorted to violence with awful consequences. As Miles manages to lift up Lily and get her out of there, MPKs start hurling flash-bangs, destroying the Ed Baldwin shrine and shooting a couple of protesters in the process. This is not at all the smooth, by-the-book operation Palmer promised. 

At Helios, matters are better only in the sense that Aleida and Dev are limited to using words as weapons (though I have it on good authority that they can be sharper than knives). The NNC leak about the M-6–Helios–Kuragin–devised plan to automate 98 percent of all of Happy Valley’s industrial and mining activities is not helping their work relationship. What the hell was the point of Dev assuring Aleida that he would be more frank and open with her, when he knew he was keeping her in the dark about a bombshell like this? If he sincerely believed participating in the automation plan was a form of harm reduction for Marsies, why wouldn’t he have sought the counsel of his CEO? What was his intended schedule for breaking this news to her? If his rationale for keeping Aleida out of the loop was that she would never agree to the plan in the first place, what did he imagine would happen when she did find out?

Whatever Dev might have imagined for his relationships once the plan was widely known, it didn’t include Alex being the leaker, much less Alex quitting his job (and, presumably, any involvement in the Meru project). Dev’s capacity for overestimating the appeal of his ideas and projects continues to astound me. For his part, Alex is caught between several feelings. He dreads the thought of anyone getting arrested and is a little taken aback by how energized Lily is about the situation. He also feels as if he’s “finally doing something meaningful” thanks to his role in the automation-plan leak. Kelly wisely cautions him about how volatile situations “can turn really fast,” as they did in 2003, but since when has a fired-up young person heeded this kind of advice? 

When I spoke to Cynthy Wu prior to the fifth-season premiere, she reflected on playing Kelly Baldwin from her teens to her late 40s, saying, “I really do feel like I grew up in real time” with the character. Wu described the journey over four seasons as going from “holding so tightly to such specific expectations and visions of how I wanted things to go” to “learning how to just let go and be more present” with whatever is happening in Kelly’s life. Being apart from Alex during this tumultuous time at Happy Valley must be very challenging, but “with Ed’s death, Kelly’s been reminded that we don’t get to live forever,” Wu said. “So if there’s something you want to do and your gut is saying you just have to go for it, you do — no regrets.” 

For as much as the Titan mission is super-important to the Helios team, we get the most fleeting whisper of a scene about it. Aleida and another mission-control colleague check in with Walt, who delivers a reassuring, measured report that while the crew knows significant challenges lie ahead, everything has been fine so far. This turns out to be mostly setup for the episode’s final moments. We had to get Lenya, Irina, and other members of the Kuragin delegation into the room to maximize the drama when the Marsies head to mission control to confront the powers that be. We close out on Lenya’s determined, worried face in tight close-up. The plot engine is revving for real now. 

Houston, We Have Some Bullet Points

• Bolkonski, the leader of the Kuragin delegation, is hilariously condescending to Lenya, summoning the bitchiness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh to tell him, “I’m happy to visit your cute little colony.” Bravo, sir! 

• Another episode, another scene of Lenya and Tasha lightly canoodling. It’s too bad For All Mankind doesn’t take place in the same TV universe as Heated Rivalry because Lenya Polivanov and Ilya Rozanov would be constantly hyping each other up and being very competitive about which of them could claim the title of loverboy-in-chief. Poor Lenya, born to smooch his wife, forced (he believes) to declare martial law on Mars.

• I’m starting to get some Colonel Kurtz vibes from Palmer as he talks about how long-term residence in the lower gravity of Mars is bad for human minds. Will the M-6 eventually send a Captain Willard after him?